Preorder TI’s ARM Cortex-M4 Launchpad for $5 delivered

Texas Instruments just open preorders for the new Stellaris LaunchPad. The boards won’t ship until the end of September, but if you don’t mind the wait you can get one for $4.99 including delivery (we’d wager non-U.S. addresses have to pay for delivery, but leave a comment if you know for sure several readers have reported that international shipping is free).

We routinely pay more in shipping for parts orders so we already jumped at the opportunity and put in our own order. Earlier in the month we heard the first murmurs about the device. We’re glad to see they hit the $4.99 target price, but the TI website mentions that this is a promotional price that will be available for a limited time only. The board boasts an ARM Cortex-M4 processor, the Stellaris LM4F120H5QR. It includes 256 KB of flash memory, 32 KB of SRAM, and more peripherals than you can shake a stick at. To get you up and running quickly they’ve included two user buttons and an RGB LED. As with the 16-bit Launchpad, the board acts as its own programmer. It has a microUSB jack, but they’ve included a micro B to USB A cable in the kit to make sure you don’t need to also put in a cable order.

We’ll give a follow-up post once we finally get our hands on the board. We hope this will be easy to get working with a Linux box!

PWM Mode
A timer is configured to PWM mode using the following sequence:
1. Ensure the timer is disabled (the TnEN bit is cleared) before making any changes.
2. Write the GPTM Configuration (GPTMCFG) register with a value of 0x0000.0004.

ST doesnt recognize the power of “getting them while they are young”. TI ships those cheap dev kits at a loss (even absorbs shipping) in house.

ST insists on resellers like arrow or element’teen. Thats great if you target companies or established developers, but will not grow your customer base. Students/ hackers/ kids like cheap, dont like being raped by surcharges and expensive shipping.

I agree. And it doesn’t help that ST doesn’t have an in-house toolchain [not last time I checked, anyhow]. They force everyone to use third-party tools. Having options is great, but not having a free, ST-supported toolchain makes it harder to get into developing for the STM32 line.

Atmel and Microchip have always done a good job there, offering everyone a decent set of free tools. The choice to not use them is always an option, too.

I hope that TI’s strategy includes catering to that demographic by offering an uncrippled version of CCS. Reducing the barrier to entry with quality free development tools eliminates the cost of development as a valid excuse for not using their ICs. I assume they will at least offer a board-locked version of CCS, so that’s a start.

Ditto questions about the toolchain for the Stellaris. I used one in a contest a couple years ago, and the only thing directly available was a Keil system for $1K+. The contest organizers provided a “free” copy that promptly died after the submission date.

Hopefully a flood of $5 dev boards will precipitate some open-source solutions.

I got that message even when my order succeeded, but it did show that I had the one board I was trying to order. I don’t know if the “removed” boards were really removed, or just a warning that it might have done that, or if it was fixing the three or four unsuccessful attempts…

It’s a bit silly that you have to supply a bunch of company information when they know damn well that there’s mostly hobbyists ordering these. Rather than making up info I opted to not order at all. Meh.

They’re clearly aiming it at the hobbyist market, with that price tag of $5. Big corporations don’t care so much about price, they are more concerned about support and long-term availability. After all, if they’re going to pay $7k on the development software, $5 or $100 on the development board don’t make much of a difference.
But I’m so pissed I can only order two of these. I’d like to stock a couple more and give away another couple to friends.

I put “Consumer electronics – other”, and indicated that I wasn’t an arms dealer or whatever. If their marketing people can’t figure out that my company named “none” isn’t really selling stuff, too bad.

I may be wrong, but I believe they are required to ask those questions to export, almost everytime I buy microcontrollers from the US I have to answer some kind of variation of one of those. The last time I ordered XMEGAS from mouser they had to ask similar questions by email before shipping.

Kind of silly, I’m pretty sure a super-villain would not say they would be used for global domination…

This might be slightly offtopic, but would this be a good board to start learning to work and program micro controllers?

I have a fairly large coding experience, both professionally and as a hobby, but never did really try to work with anything other that computers and I’m interested in learning. For 5$ shipped this seems to be cheap enough to risk buying it even if I don’t end using it for anything.

So… opinions? worth it to learn? capable/easy enough for a couple of beginner projects so I can decide whether I like it or not?(any resources on this topic would be appreciated too)

Successfully ordered 2 from Latvia/EU – no additional shipping costs (money already got substracted as well).
I did not realize, I could skip Company name. Well, I put company, where I work in anyway (although they do not do anything remotely in common with electronics).

I don’t know but I’ve never had to pay customs on any tool that I have ordered. If its a company address they charge what ever they want, to residential addresses there is no problem. TI uses FedEx which gets bulk custom clearance.